'Blood Brothers’ 
CHRISTIANNA BRAND

OFFICER: Inspector Cockrill 
FORCE: Kent County Police 
TIME: 1965 

CASES: ‘Heads You Lose’ (1941), ‘The Crooked Wreath’ (1946), ‘London Particular’ (1952), ‘Tour de Force’ (1955), ‘Rabbit Out of a Hat’ (1967) etc.

PROFILE: Inspector ‘Cockie’ Cockrill is a complete contrast to Petrella-an eccentric, omniscient detective rather than a follower of police procedural methods. A shrewd, occasionally sharp-tongued officer based at Heronsford in Kent, he is invariably shabbily dressed, with his hat crammed down over his head and his fingers dark stained from too many hand-rolled cigarettes. Cockrill is actually a few inches shorter than the required height for police officers-but no one should be fooled by this or his appearance because behind the brown eyes and aquiline nose, the Inspector possesses acute powers of observation which have enabled him time and again to unmask the real criminal among the most unlikely assembly of suspects. Generations of readers have been trying to outwit ‘Cockie’ Cockrill, but most usually come unstuck because of red herrings and false clues which he, of course, sees through. The little detective made his debut in ‘Heads You Lose’ (1941), in which the decapitated head of a spinster lady sparked off a gruesome murder hunt. This was followed by a wartime mystery, ‘Green For Danger’ (1944), which has been praised as one of the great detective novels of all time, and was filmed two years later with Alastair Sim as a rather lankier Inspector than his fans had expected. Accounts of his career have, sadly, been rather intermittent since the ‘seventies.

CREATOR: Christianna Brand is the pseudonym of Mary Christianna Lewis (b. 1907), who worked in a variety of occupations, including governess, receptionist, dancer, model and salesgirl, before writing her first mystery novel, ‘Death in High Heels’ (1941), which, she said, was inspired by fear of a fellow worker! Her subsequent crime stories-especially those about Inspector Cockrill-have won her a number of awards from writers’ associations on both sides of the Atlantic and there are some critics who consider her best work to be the equal of Agatha Christie’s. In the following short story written in 1965, the irascible ‘Cockie’ sets out to unravel a curious mystery involving the famous Birdswell twins-the ‘blood brothers’ of the title.

THE STORY:

‘And devoted, I hear,’ he says. ‘David and Jonathan,’ he says. ‘In fact you might properly be called,’ he says, with that Glitter in his eye, ‘blood brothers?’
Well, he can sneer but it’s true we was pally enough, Fred and me, till Lydia came along. Shared the same digs in the village-Birdswell’s our village, if you know it?-Birdswell, in Kent. Everyone in Birdswell knows us-even if they can’t easily tell the difference between us-and used to say how wonderful it was, us two so alike, with our strong legs and big shoulders and curly red hair, like a kid’s: and what a beautiful understanding we had, what a bond of union. People talk a lot of crap about identical twins.
Lydia couldn’t tell the difference between us either-seemingly. Was that my fault? Fair enough, she was Fred’s girl first-unless you counted her husband, and to some extent you did have to count him: six foot five, he is, and it isn’t only because he’s the blacksmith that they call him in the village, Black Will. But she switched to me of her own accord, didn’t she?-even if I wasn’t too quick to disillusion her, the first time she started with her carryings-on, mistaking me for Fred. ‘I can’t help it if she fancies me more than you, now,’ I said to Fred.
‘You’ll regret this, you two-timing, double-crossing bastard,’ said Fred: he always did have a filthy temper, Fred.
Well, I did regret it: and not so very long after. Fred and me shares a car between us-a heavy old bashed-up, fourth-hand ‘family model’, but at least it goes. And one evening, when he’d slouched off, ugly and moody as he was those days, to poach the river down by the Vicarage woods, I picked up Lydia and took her out in it, joy-riding. Not that there was much joy in it. We hadn’t been out twenty minutes when, smooching around with Lydia, I suppose, not paying enough attention to the road-well, I didn’t see the kid until I’d hit him. Jogging along the grass verge he was, with his little can of blackberries: haring home as fast as his legs would go, a bit scared, I daresay, because the dark was catching up on him. Well-the dark caught him up all right: poor little bastard. I scrambled out and knelt down and turned him over; and got back again, quick. ‘He’s gone,’ I said to Lydia, ‘and we’d best be gone too.’ She made a lot of fuss, woman-like, but what was the point of it? If he wasn’t dead now, he would be mighty soon, there wasn’t any doubt of it: lying there with the can still clutched in his fat little hand and the blackberries spilt, and scattered all around him. I couldn’t do nothing; if I could have I daresay I’d have waited, but I couldn’t. So what was the use of bringing trouble on myself, when the chances were that I could get clear away with it?
And I did get clear away with it. The road was hard and dry, the cars that followed and stopped must have obscured my tyre marks, if there were any. They found half a footprint in the dried mud, where I’d bent over him; but it was just a cheap, common make of shoe, pretty new so it had no particular marks to it; and a largish size, of course, but nothing out of the ordinary. No one knew I’d been on that road-everything Lydia did with us two was done in deep secret, because of Black Will. Will was doing time at the moment, for beating up a keeper who came on him, poaching (we all spent most of our evenings poaching). But he’d be back some day.
And Fred promised me an alibi, when I told him about it: clutching at his arm, shaking a bit by this time, losing confidence because Lydia was threatening to turn nasty. ‘I’ll say you was in the woods with me,’ he said. And he did, too. They came to our door, ‘regulation police enquiries’; but Lydia wouldn’t dare to tell, not really, I could see that in the light of day, and they had no other sort of reason to suspect me, especially. And nobody did-it could have been any stranger, speeding along the empty country roads. Fred pretended to be reluctant to alibi me, cagey about saying where we was-because of the poaching. He managed it fine, it sort of threw their interest halfway in a different direction. I thought it was decent of Fred, considering about me and Lydia. But brotherly love is a wonderful thing, isn’t it?
Or isn’t it? Because it hadn’t been all for nothing. No sooner was I clear of that lot than he says to me: ‘Well-has she told you?’
Told me what?’ I says. ‘Who? Lydia?’
‘Lydia,’ he says. ‘She’s having a baby.’
‘Well, don’t look at me,’ I said, and quick. ‘I’ve only been going with the girl a couple of weeks.’
‘And her husband hasn’t been going with her at all,’ said Fred. ‘On account of he’s been in prison for the past five months.’
‘For half killing a man,’ I said, thoughtfully; and I looked Fred up and down. Fred and me are no weeds, like I said; but Black Will, he’s halfway to a giant.
‘And due out at the end of October,’ said Fred.
‘Well, good luck to the two of you,’ says I. ‘It’s nothing to do with me. I had her for a couple of weeks, and now even that’s over. She reckons I ought to have stopped and seen to the kid: she’s given me the bird.’
‘She’ll give you more than the bird,’ he says ‘and me too when Will comes home. When he knows about the baby, he’ll beat the rest out of her; and then God help you and me too.’
‘The baby could be Jimmy Green’s,’ I said. ‘Or Bill Bray’s. She’s been out with them, too.’
‘That’s her tales,’ he said, ‘to make you jealous. They’re a sight too scared of Will to let Lydia make up to them. And so ought you and I to have been too, if we’d had any sense.’ Only where Lydia was concerned, there never seemed to be time to have sense; and six months ago, Fred said, Black Will’s return had seemed like an aeon away. ‘So what are you going to do?’ I said.
‘What are you going to do?’ he said. ‘A hit-and-run driver-you can get a long stretch for that. The kid wasn’t dead yet, when they found him.’
Good old brotherly love!-Fred worrying about me, when after all I had pinched his girl. And him in such trouble himself.
We went out in the car, where no one could hear us: our old landlady’s pretty deaf and takes no interest at all in our comings and goings, but Fred wasn’t taking no chances...
Because it was all Fred’s idea: that I will say, and stick to it-it was Fred’s idea. Dead men tell no tales, said Fred; nor dead girls, neither. ‘If they find she’s in the family way-it’s like you said, she was spreading it around she’d been going with half the village. Once she was past talking, Will couldn’t pin it on us two: not to be certain.’
‘Speak for yourself,’ I said.
‘She’d be past talking about the hit-and-run, too,’ he said. ‘You say she’s sore about that. She won’t tell now, because it means admitting she was joyriding with you; but once Black Will gets it out of her that she was-and he will-then she’ll tell about the accident too; it’ll make her feel easier.’
‘So what do you suggest?’ I said. ‘I’m not killing the girl, I can tell you I that, flat.’
‘No,’ he said. ‘I’ll do that. You’ve done one killing,’ he said, not too pleasantly, I thought, ‘that’ll do for you. All I want from you now is an alibi.’
‘What, me alibi you?’ I said. ‘No one’d believe it for a minute. One twin speaking up for another-the whole village would testify how “close” we are.’ (The whole village not knowing anything about us and Lydia.)
But Fred had thought of all that too. If a straight alibi failed, he said, there were other ways of playing it. He had it all worked out-suspiciously well worked out, I ought to have thought; but he gave me no time for thinking. ‘It won’t come to any alibi, our names probably won’t even come into it-as you say, the baby could be fathered on half the male population of Birdswell. But if it does-well, you alibi for me, I alibi for you; they’ll know it was one of us, but they’ll never know which of us; and if they don’t know which of us, they’ll have to let both of us go.’
‘And Black Will?’ I said. ‘When we’ve not only seduced his wife, but murdered her-which one of us will he let go?’
‘Oh, well,’ he said, ‘we’d have to clear out anyway, if it got as far as that: start again somewhere else. But the chances are a hundred to one it’ll never come to it. After all, no one suspected you of the hit-and-run affair.’
He kept coming back to that: and sort of-nastily. I didn’t forget that I’d done him wrong, pinching his girl. But that was his lever, really: while he kept reminding me, he could pretty well force me to go in with him-he was in trouble, but I was in trouble deeper.
So we worked it out: we worked out everything, to the last detail. This was Tuesday, we’d do it Thursday night. I’d see nothing more of the girl; but he’d get her to go driving with him on pretence of talking over the baby business. And he’d lead round to the accident, advising her, maybe, to confess to the police it was me; and drive past where it happened. And get her to get out of the car and show him where the boy was lying... And then-well, then there’d be a second hit-and-run killing on that lonely corner. ‘You got away with it,’ he kept saying. ‘Why not another?’
There was a kind of-well, justice, in it, I thought. After all, it was because she was threatening to tell about the hit-and-run that I was letting her be murdered. ‘But what about clues?’ I said. ‘Even I left a footprint.’
He had worked that out too. He and I are the same size, of course, and most of our clothes are the same as one another’s. Not for any silly reason of dressing identical, but simply because when he’d go along shopping, I’d go along too, and mostly we’d like the same things; or he’d buy something and it’d be a success, so I’d buy the same, later. We must dress the same on the night, he said, because of the alibi: and we checked our stuff over, shoes, grey flannels, shirts, without jackets-this all happened in September. Our blue poplins were in the wash-we’d worn them clean Sunday, and second-day Monday; so it would have to be the striped wool-and-nylon-a bit warm for this weather, if anyone remarked it, but we’d have to risk that, I said, we daren’t ask the old woman to wash out our blue ones special. The last thing we wanted, was to do anything out of the ordinary. That was what the police looked for: the break in routine. That was asking for it.
Our shoes were the same: same size, same make, bought together; a rubber sole with bars across it, but, like I said, new enough not to be worn down, or have any peculiarities. And everything else we’d wear identical: not only for the alibi, but in case of bits caught in the girl’s fingernails or what-not-you’ve only got to read the papers. Not that he meant to get near enough for that. But she might not-well, she might not kick-in at once, if you see what I mean; he might have to get out of the car and do something about it. And in case of scratches, he said, I’d better be prepared to get some scratches on my own hands too-we could say we’d been blackberrying or something.
‘Blackberrying,’ I said. ‘That’d be bloody likely! We both detest blackberries, everybody knows it: or anyway, the old woman knows it, we never touch her blackberry pie.’ I knew he’d only said it to remind me of the kid: him and his little can of blackberries, spilt all around him...
‘Oh, well,’ he said, ‘say we got scratched pushing through the brambles down by the river. Do your poaching down by the bramble patch.’
But she didn’t scratch him. It was all a bit grim, I think: he couldn’t be sure she was properly done in and he had to get out of the car and have a look and-well, go back and take a second run at her. But she didn’t have the strength left to scratch him. All the same, he looked pretty ghastly when finally we met in the moonlight, in the Vicarage woods. He didn’t say anything, just stood there, staring at me with a sort of sick, white heaviness. I couldn’t exactly say anything either; it was worse than, talking it over, I’d thought it ever would be. I sort of-looked a question at him; and he gave me a weary kind of nod and glanced away towards the river. It was easier to talk about my angle, so I said, at last: ‘Well, I saw the Vicar.’
‘But did he see you?’ he said. We’d agreed on the Reverend, because he always walked across the church of a Thursday evening: you’d be sure of passing him, if you went at a certain time.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘He saw me. I gave a sort of grunt for “good evening” and he said “Going poaching?” and gave me a bit of a grin. You’d better remember that.’ He nodded again but he said nothing more; and more to ease the silence than anything else, I said: ‘Is the car all right? Not marked?’
‘What does it matter if it is?’ he said. ‘It’s marked all over, no one could say what’s old or what’s new: you know that, from bashing the boy.’ As for bits of her clothing and-blood and all that, he’d had the idea of spreading a bit of plastic over the front of the car before he-well, did it. He produced the plastic folded in a bit of brown paper and we wrapped the whole lot round a stone and sank it, then and there, in the river. There was blood on the plastic all right. It gave me the shudders.
But next thing he said, I really had something to shudder at. He said: ‘Anyway, your number’s up, mate. She’s shopped you.’
‘Shopped me?’ I said. I stood and stared at him.
‘Shopped you,’ he said. ‘She’d already sent off an anonymous note to the police. About the hit-and-run.’
‘How do you know?’ I said. I couldn’t believe it.
‘She told me so,’ he said. ‘It was on her conscience.’
Her conscience. Lydia’s conscience! I started to laugh, a bit hysterical, I suppose, with the strain of it. He put his hand on my wrist and gave me a little shake. ‘Steady lad,’ he said. ‘Don’t lose your head. I’m looking after you.’ It wasn’t like him to be so demonstrative, but there you are-it’s like the poem says, when times are bad, there isn’t no friend like a brother. ‘It’s just a matter of slanting the alibi,’ he said.
Well, we’d worked that out, too; like I said. There’d always be a risk that they wouldn’t accept a brother’s alibi, that we two was together. The other time, about the accident, they’d had no special reason to suspect me, they’d accepted that all right; but this might at any moment turn into a murder enquiry. And a murder enquiry into us, now they knew about the hit-and-run. But as he said-we had the alternative.
I hadn’t counted on its being Inspector Cockrill. When I realised it was him-come all the way over from Heronsford-I knew they meant business. And to be honest, it struck a bit chill to the heart of me. A little man he is, for a policeman, and near retiring age, he must be-he looks like a grandfather; but his eyes are as bright as a bird’s and they seem to look right into you. He came into the old woman’s best parlour and he had us brought in there, and he looked us up and down. ‘Well, well,’ he said, ‘the famous Birdswell twins! You certainly are identicals, aren’t you?’ And he gave us a look of a sort of fiendish glee, or so it seemed to me, and said: ‘And devoted, I hear? An almost mystic bond, I hear? David and Jonathan, Damon and Pythias and all the rest of it? In fact,’ he said, ‘you might properly be called-blood brothers?’
We stood in front of him, silent. He said at last: ‘Well, which is which? And no nonsense.’
We told him: and no nonsense.
‘So you’re the one that killed the child?’ he said to me. ‘And drove on, regardless.’
‘I never was near the child,’ I said. ‘I was in the woods, on Monday evening-poaching.’
‘Yours is the name stated in the anonymous letter.’
‘I don’t know who wrote the letter,’ I said. ‘But no one can tell us apart, me and my brother.’
‘Even your fancy girl?’ he said. ‘It appears it was she who wrote the letter.’
‘I don’t know what you mean,’ I said, ‘by my fancy girl.’
‘Well, everybody else does,’ he said. ‘All the village knows she was playing you off, one against the other. And grinning behind their hands, waiting for her husband’s homecoming.’
‘But all the village can’t tell us two apart,’ I said. ‘I was out poaching.’
‘That’s a damn lie,’ says Fred, playing it the way we’d agreed upon. ‘That was me, poaching.’
‘One of you was poaching?’ says Inspector Cockrill, very smooth. ‘And one of you was with the lady? And even the lady couldn’t have said which was which?’
He said it sort of-suggestive. ‘I daresay she might,’ I said, ‘later on in the proceedings. But there couldn’t have been any proceedings that night, there wouldn’t have been time: because the accident happened.’
‘Why should she say so positively that it was you, then?’
‘I daresay she thought it was,’ I says. ‘I daresay he told her so. She’d finished with him: it would be the only way he could get her.’
‘I see,’ said Inspector Cockrill. ‘How very ingenious!’ I didn’t know whether he meant how ingenious of Fred to have thought of it then, or of me to think of it now.
‘Don’t you listen to him, sir,’ says Fred. ‘He’s a bloody liar. I wasn’t with the girl that night. I tell you-I was poaching.’
‘All right, you were poaching,’ said Inspector Cockrill. ‘Any witnesses?’
‘Of course not. You don’t go poaching with witnesses. I used to go with him,’ says Fred, bitterly gesturing with his head towards me, ‘but not since he pinched my girl, the bloody so-and-so.’
‘And last night?’ says the Inspector softly. ‘When the girl was murdered?’
‘Last night too, the same,’ said Fred. ‘I was in the woods, poaching.’
‘You call me a liar!’ I said. ‘It was me in the woods. The Vicar saw me going there.’
‘It was me the Vicar saw,’ said Fred. ‘I told him, Good evening, and he laughed and said. “Going poaching?” ‘
‘There!’ said Inspector Cockrill to me, like a teacher patiently getting the truth from a difficult child. ‘How could he know that? Because the Vicar will surely confirm it?’
‘He knows it because I told him,’ I said. ‘I told him I’d been poaching and I hoped the Vicar hadn’t really realised where I was going.’
‘Very ingenious,’ said Inspector Cockrill again. ‘Ve-ry ingenious.’ It seemed like he couldn’t get over it all, sitting there, shaking his head at the wonder of it. But I knew he was playing for time, I knew that we’d foxed him.
And Fred knew too. He suggested, reasonably: ‘Why should you be so sure, sir, that the girl was murdered? Why not just a second hit-and-run?’
‘A bit of a coincidence?’ said Inspector Cockrill, mildly. ‘Same thing, in the same place and so very soon after? And when on top of it, we find that the girl was threatening a certain person with exposure, about the first hit-and-run...’ He left it in the air. He said to his sergeant: ‘Have you collected their clobber?’
‘Yessir,’ said the sergeant. ‘Two pairs of shoes’-and he gave the Inspector a sort of nod, as if to say, Yes, they look as if they’ll match very nicely-‘and all the week’s laundry.’
‘Including Monday’s?’ says Cockrill.
‘Including Monday evening’s, sir. The old woman washes of a Monday morning. Anything they’ve worn after that-which includes two shirts to each, sir-is in two laundry baskets, one in each bedroom.’
‘Two baskets?’ he says, looking more bright eyed than ever. ‘That’s a bit of luck. Their laundry’s kept separate, is it?’
‘Yes, it is,’ says Fred, though I don’t know what call he had to butt in. ‘His in his room, mine in mine.’
‘And no chance of its getting mixed up?’ said Inspector Cockrill. He fixed Fred with that beady eye of his. This could be important.’
Fred, of course, was maintaining the mutual-accusation arrangement we’d agreed upon. ‘Not a chance, sir,’ he said a bit too eagerly.
I wasn’t going to be left out. I said: ‘Not the slightest.’
That’s right, sir,’ says the sergeant. The old lady confirms it.’
‘Good,’ said Cockrill. He gave a few orders and the sergeant went away. People were still buzzing about, up in our bedrooms. ‘I’m coming,’ called up the Inspector, to someone at the head of the stairs. He turned back to us. ‘All right, Cain and Abel,’ he said, ‘I’ll leave you to stew in it. But in a day or two, as the song says, “I’ll be seeing you.” And when I do, it’ll be at short notice. So stick around, won’t you?’
‘And if we don’t?’ I said. ‘You’ve got nothing against us, you can’t charge us; you’ve got no call to be giving us orders.’
‘Who’s giving orders?’ he said. ‘Just a little advice. But before you ignore the advice-take a good, hard, look at yourselves. You won’t need any mirrors. And ask yourselves,’ he said, giving us a good, hard, long look on his own account, from the soles of our feet to the tops of our flaming red heads, ‘just how far you’d get...’
So that was that; and for the next two days, we ‘stewed in it’: David and Jonathan, Cain and Abel-like he’d said, blood brothers.
On the third day, he sent for us, to Heronsford police station. They shoved Fred into one little room and me in another. He talked to Fred first, and I waited. All very chummy, fags and cups of tea and offers of bread and butter: but it was the waiting...
Long after I knew I couldn’t stand one more minute of it, he came. I suppose they muttered some formalities, but I don’t remember: Fred and I might hate one another, and by this time we did, well and truly, there’s no denying it-but it was worse, a thousand times worse, without him there. My head felt as though it were filled with grey cotton-wool, little stuffy, warm clouds of it. He sat down in front of me. He said: ‘Well-have you come to your senses? Of course, you killed her?’
‘If anyone killed her,’ I said, clinging to our patter, ‘it must have been him.’
‘Your brother?’ he said. ‘But why should your brother have killed her?’
‘Well,’ I says, ‘if the girl was having a baby-‘
‘A baby?’ he says, surprised; and his eyes got that bright, glittering look in them. He said after a minute of steady thinking: ‘But she wasn’t.’
‘She wasn’t?’ I said. ‘She wasn’t? But she’d told him-‘
Or hadn’t she told him? Something, like an icicle of light, ice-cold, piercing, brilliant, thrust itself into the dark places of my cotton-wool mind. I said: ‘The bloody, two-timing, double-crossing bastard...!’
‘He didn’t seem,’ said the Inspector, softly, ‘to expect her to have been found pregnant.’
So that was it! So that was it! So as to get me to agree to the killing, to get me to assist with it... I ought to have been more fly-why should Fred, of all people, be so much afraid of Black Will as to go in for murder? Will’s a dangerous man, but Fred’s not exactly a softie... The icicle turned in my mind and twisted, probing with its light-rays into the cotton-woolliness. Revenge! Cold, sullen, implacable revenge upon the two of us-because Lydia had come to me: because I had taken her. Death for her: and I to be the accomplice in her undoing-in my own undoing. And for me... I knew now who had sent the anonymous note about the hit-and-run accident: so easily to be ‘traced’ (after she was dead) to Lydia.
But yet-he was as deep in it as I was: deeper, had he but known it. I said, fighting my way up out of the darkness: ‘Even if she had been pregnant, it wouldn’t have been my fault. I’d only been going a couple of weeks with the girl.’
‘That’s what you say,’ he said.
‘But all the village-‘
‘All the village knew there were goings-on; nobody knew just where they went on, or when. You must, all three, have been remarkably careful.’
I tried another tack. ‘But if she wasn’t pregnant-why should I have killed her?’
‘You’ve just told me yourself that you thought she was,’ he said.
‘Because he told me-my brother told me. Now, look, Inspector,’ I said, trying to think it out as I went along, trying to ram it home to him, ‘you say she wasn’t having a baby? So why should I have thought she was? She wouldn’t have told me, if she hadn’t been: why should she? It was he who told me: it was my brother. But you say yourself, he knew it wasn’t true. So why should he have told me?’
He looked at me, cold as ice. He said: ‘That’s easy. He wanted you to kill her for him.’
He wanted me to kill her! I could have laughed. The thing was getting fantastic, getting out of hand; and yet at the same time I had the feeling that the fantasy was a hard, gripping, grim fantasy, that, once it had its hold on me, would never shake loose. I stammered out: ‘Why should he have wanted her killed?’
‘Because,’ he said, ‘she was threatening to tell that it was he who ran the child down, and left it to die.’ And he said, cold and bitter: ‘I have no wish to trap you. We know that it was your brother who killed the child: we have proof of it. And we know it was you who killed the girl. We have proof of that too: there’s her blood on your cuff.’
On my cuff. Where he had put his hand that night: taking my wrist in his grasp, giving me a brotherly little shake ‘to steady me’. I remembered how I’d thought, even then, that it wasn’t like him to be so demonstrative.
Putting his hand on my wrist-fresh from the blood-smeared plastic. Making such a point, later on, about there being no chance of our soiled shirts getting confused, one with the other’s...
So there it is. I wonder if we’ll be doing our time in the same prison?-sharing the same cell, maybe?-we two blood brothers...
Because he’ll be doing time all right, as well as me. While I’m doing my time for his killing of the girl-he’ll be doing his, for my killing of the child.
Well-that’s all right with me. He’ll be first out, I daresay, (is it murder to leave a kid to die, in case, when he gets better, he tells? I suppose not: the actual knocking-down would be accidental, after all). So Fred’ll be out, first: and Black Will will be there to meet him when he comes. By the time I get out, I daresay Will will be ‘in’ for what he done to Fred; may even have got over it all by then-it looks like being a very long time away.
But can you beat it?-working it out so far ahead, leading up to it so softly, so craftily... And all for revenge: revenge on his own twin brother!
After all, what I did, was done in self-preservation: there was no venom in it, I wished him no harm. That night after the accident, I mean: when, clutching his arm, begging him to help me-just to be on the safe side, I rubbed his sleeve with the juice of a blackberry.